The present application relates to software and more specifically to user interface designs, data models, and methods for displaying and interacting with data and/or concepts.
Software for facilitating presenting data and facilitating user interaction therewith are employed in various demanding applications, including enterprise resource planning, scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, market studies, manufacturing production control, drug discovery, and so on. Such applications often demand versatile software that can efficiently display various types of data, which may be organized in various data structures or formats, i.e., data models.
Such versatile software can be particularly important in enterprise computing environments, where large, complex, and changing data sets and accompanying data models are common. In particular, long-running web applications commonly used in enterprise computing environments may be tasked with presenting data (e.g., via tables, forms, etc.), where ultimate characteristics (e.g., shape) of the associated data model (e.g., numbers of tables and rows, row widths, column heights, etc.) are unpredictable at design time.
However, conventionally, once a software application is developed and deployed, changes to underlying data models may necessitate reconfiguring and redeploying the software application to support the new data models. Reconfiguring and redeploying software applications can be time consuming and costly, especially in large enterprise environments.